Tag Archives: future of higher education

This study makes use of detailed student-level data from eight cohorts of first-year students at Northwestern University to investigate the relative effects of tenure track/tenured versus contingent faculty on student learning. We focus on classes taken during a student’s first term at Northwestern and employ an identification strategy in which we control for both student-level…

In 2013, Auburn University’s curriculum review committee took up the case of a small, unpopular undergraduate major called public administration. After concluding that the major added very little to the school’s academic mission, the committee voted to eliminate it. But according to internal documents and emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the committee’s decision…

Winter is coming to higher education. This month, Louisiana State University fired—outright fired—a tenured professor of education, Teresa Buchanan, ostensibly for creating a “hostile work environment” via sexual harassment. Her infraction? Allowing profanities to pass from her tenured lips, and unleashing a single ill-advised bon mot about sexual intercourse. http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/06/30/lsu_professor_fired_over_f_word_p_word_off_color_joke_finally_academia_s.html

But colleges rarely go under because they are heavily subsidized and regulated by the government. They receive hundreds of billions of dollars in direct subsidies (and indirect tax breaks as non-profits) and the only way to get access to those funds is to be an accredited institution, under a system controlled by the colleges themselves.…

Adam Leitman Bailey, a Manhattan attorney who runs a real estate firm, says he looks to hire law school graduates who have grit, ambition and a resolve to succeed in the legal profession. For that reason, he says, his firm has instituted a rule: If your resume lists your law school as Yale, Harvard, Columbia,…

Not really, but close. Via a posting by Jeff Strohl on the postsecondary-data google group: It is important to keep an eye on some growing language that seeming aims to ‘outlaw’ predictive analytics (When regressions are outlawed, only Social Scientists will regress!!) http://www.vitter.senate.gov/newsroom/press/vitter-introduces-student-privacy-protection-act “(C) NO NATIONAL DATABASE.—Nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize the…

A right-leaning public policy foundation is making waves in North Carolina’s public university system. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on how the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy is getting traction among the state’s Republican political leadership. The Center, the Chronicle tells us, aims to “[make] public colleges more accountable to the public, by holding them to their ‘chief goals…

Great article on a new start-up college that claims to be upending higher ed. Minerva, which operates for profit, started teaching its inaugural class of 33 students this month. To seed this first class with talent, Minerva gave every admitted student a full-tuition scholarship of $10,000 a year for four years, plus free housing in…

The primary, overarching purpose of doctoral programs is to produce professors. Graduate school has a cult-like effect on what you think you should want as a graduate student. I have seen it turn people who thought they wanted to go work for the Defense Department turn into quivering blobs of jelly because they failed, five…

From a great interview of Thiel by Tyler Cowen: Well there are lots of things that are true that everyone agrees with me on. I think for example even this idea that the university system is somewhat screwed up and somewhat broken at this point. This is not even a heterodox or a very controversial…